Quotes & Sayings About Characterisation

Sometimes I create a character from a scrap - a mere mention that has been left behind. — Sara Sheridan

Forget narrative, backstory, characterisation, exposition, all of that. Just make the audience want to know what happens next. — David Mamet

Discussing the character of Elizabeth Bennet in Pride and Prejudice is a matter of content (of 'what?'), whereas examining Jane Austen's techniques of characterisation is a question of form (or 'how?'). Some may find these fine distinctions scholastic, but then some find any fine distinctions scholastic. — Terry Eagleton

A word out of place or an interesting choice of vocabulary can spawn a whole character. — Sara Sheridan

It was not her way to make a conspicuous entry into anyone's life, but towards the end of that week Sebastian said rather sourly: "You and mummy seem very thick," and I realized that in fact I was being drawn into intimacy by swift, imperceptible stages, for she was impatient of any human relationship that fell short of it. — Evelyn Waugh

So long as people expect paintings to be simply coloured photographs they get no individuality and, in the case of portraits, no characterisation. — William Dobell

Very often the characters people respond best to have little parts of reality they can relate to. — Sara Sheridan

You can't say the public likes generic characters. Give others a chance, go for a more rooted and honest characterisation, take some risk, and then let the public choose. — Randeep Hooda

I would like to carve my novel in a piece of wood. My characters - I would like to have them heavier, more three-dimensional ... My characters have a profession, have characteristics; you know their age, their family situation, and everything. But I try to make each one of those characters heavy, like a statue, and to be the brother of everybody in the world. — Georges Simenon

If you put Mirabelle into some of the situations she gets into, there is only one way Mirabelle can behave. — Sara Sheridan

He was endowed with the extraordinary powers of endurance characteristic of madmen and simpletons. — Vasily Grossman

I'm not good at dialogue. I'm not good at holding a mirror up at a real world. I'm not good at believable characterisation. — Jim Crace

I like dramas because there's a big overlap between film and fiction, so I feel relatively qualified to talk about plot and characterisation and that sort of thing. — Sarah Waters

The Magyars were claimed to be descendants of the hideous Asiatic Scythians of legend, half men and half apes, a witches' brood begotten by devils. The sources - chronicles and annals - were all copied from one another, not on the basis of eyewitness accounts but following the characterisation of older chroniclers. Soon the "new barbarians" became identified with the Huns, who are remembered only too well in Europe. Attila had, after all, become in Western eyes the embodiment of barbarism, the anti-Christ, and at the time of the Renaissance he already appeared in Italian legends as the king of the Hungarians, constantly hatching plots, and depicted with dog ears, the bestial offspring of a greyhound and a princess locked up in a tower.12 — Paul Lendvai

Mirabelle and Vesta have plenty in common because they are facing descrimination in different ways, but they're also a nice contrast. — Sara Sheridan

It's always the case, whenever you're doing someone real, how much you want to do an impression or a characterisation. If I was doing Churchill, or Gandhi - people know exactly how they talked, walked. — Martin Freeman